The folks at Facebook are probably wishing they had a giant recall button at their disposal.

The hugely popular social-networking Web site suffered an apparent glitch late Wednesday, when a small number of Facebook users were bombarded with e-mails that were not meant for them.

According to the Wall Street Journal Web site, which first reported the snafu, Facebook blamed the glitch on a bug in computer code used to handle messages on the site. Somehow that bug let some messages be rerouted to people who were not the intended recipients. In one instance, the Journal said, a user received more than 100 messages that he wasn’t supposed to get.

The mix-up is likely to spur privacy advocates to revive their gripes about Facebook’s handling of personal information. The Web site a few months ago made changes that drew jeers from a number of users who worried that their private information wasn’t safe.